All new research is first presented in a Working Paper (WP) where the target audience is primarily other researchers. All WP’s from recent years are written in English. Since 2006, a Swedish summary has also been included. A WP usually contains research that has progressed enough to be ready to be submitted to a scientific journal for review and potential publication.

Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the U.S. Using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period 1990 to 2013, we find young firms to be more prominent in the Swedish business sector than in the…

This paper addresses women's under-representation in top jobs in organizational hierarchies. We show that promotions to top jobs dramatically increase women's probability of divorce, but do not affect men's marriages. This effect is causally…

Several recent behavioral models of choice build on the idea that decision makers put more weight on attributes in which the available options differ more. We test this assumption in a controlled experiment where such biases will generate choice…

We nuance the widely held view that well-functioning institutions are the ultimate prerequisite for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is done by putting the spotlight on the role that formal and informal institutions have in serving the economic…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden’s education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost,…

This paper studies the effect of the firm-size distribution on the relationship between employment and output. We construct a theoretical model, which predicts that changes in demand for industry output have larger effects on employment in industries…

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has increased in importance over the last decades, globally as well as in Indonesia. We examine how such inflows of FDI affects value added in Indonesia. The effect is positive: foreign firms generate relatively high levels…

I examine the effects of privatization, in the form of acquisitions, in the Swedish electricity distribution sector. As the majority of the distribution networks remained publicly owned, I use a synthetic control method to identify the effects on price…

Sweden is often described as a country where intergenerational social mobility is high, but research also shows that social mobility decreases the closer one gets to the extreme top of the income distribution. We study the occupational mobility for an…

This paper presents evidence of how attitudes toward gender roles in the home and market are shaped by Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries with ancestry from across the world are studied.…

Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with specified output targets and payments. The principal…

Previous studies of policy responses to economic crises argue that crises may lead to more interventionist policy but also cause deregulation. The empirical evidence in previous studies is equally mixed.
The present paper argues that whether or not…

This study uses new data on Swedish national wealth over the last two hundred years to examine whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) extend to small and less developed economies. The findings reveal both…

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life.
Also, if elites…

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates, we examine the robustness of high social trust in countries with different levels of institutional…

This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000–2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax registers for the period thereafter when a repeal of the…

The sharing economy (peer-to-peer based sharing or renting activities coordinated through community-based online services) is typically assumed to be closely related to social trust. The two sharing economy companies Airbnb and Flipkey exist in over 100…

We estimate the impact of the removal of a railway transportation subsidy on the local economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, exploiting the large regional variation in these one-time freight rate increases. We find that higher freight rates…

The surplus that is created in a successful entrepreneurial venture is much higher than the profit corresponding to the risk-adjusted market rate of return. The part of the surplus that exceeds this level may be denoted “entrepreneurial rent.”…

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at upper-secondary voucher schools on average score 0.06 standard deviations lower on externally…

We analyse how the Bosman ruling changed the incentives for football clubs in the European Union (EU) to develop talents. We show that the stiffer bidding competition over star players after the Bosman ruling has spurred talent development primarily in EU…

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of health in the very long run. Using a unique purpose-built administrative dataset on individuals born in Sweden between 1930–34 and their parents, we study the intergenerational…

This paper investigates the potential of an infant intervention to improve life expectancy, contributing to emerging interest in the early life origins of chronic disease. We analyse a pioneering program trialled in Sweden in the 1930s, which provided…

A large and growing empirical literature has presented evidence of job polarization, i.e. the simultaneous growth of high-wage jobs and low-wage jobs at the expense of middle-wage jobs. Thus far, the focus has been on employment in different occupations,…

This study examines the role of institutional environment in influencing the migration of corporate governance best practice into 22 emerging African economies. Using a unique and comprehensive sample hand-collected sample of 202 IPO firms from…

We use new population-wide register data on inheritances and wealth in Sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality. We find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequality (e.g., the Gini coefficient falls by 5–10…

Even though the World Trade Organization (WTO) ensures equal access to the dispute settlement system, the legal process is still highly costly, an aspect that primarily affects poorer developing countries. It is feared that this imbalance discourages…

High levels of social trust has been linked to both public sector size and long term economic growth, thereby helping to explain how some countries are able to combine high taxes and relatively high levels of economic growth. This paper examines if social…

Although institutional reforms are necessary to increase rates of entrepreneurship in European countries, we argue that one-size-fits-all reform strategies are unlikely to be successful. Reform strategies must be informed by a better knowledge of the…

I study the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform, implemented in 2007–09, which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is…

We survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of `macro' and `micro' characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings…

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has halved in size as the “public firm model” has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings from the stock market to study the wider economic consequences of…

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable set-up, borrowing intuitions from…

This paper presents an empirical test of the anticompetitive effects of joint ownership, by examining the operation of three nuclear plants in Sweden. Since maintenance is the main conduit explaining the variation in output, I formulate a model of…

Health assessments correlate with health outcomes and subjective well-being. Immigrants offer an opportunity to study persistent social influences on health where the social conditions are not endogenous to individual outcomes. This approach provides a…

We use exceptionally rich data on all business, economics, and engineering graduates in Sweden to study women’s career progression and its causes. A wide range of observables do not explain the lack of women in top executive positions.
Instead,…

This paper shows that in online car auctions, resellers are better at appraising the value of the cars they are bidding on than are consumers. Using a unique data set of online car auctions, I show that differences in bidding behavior between resellers…

Welfare services are an important part of the Nordic welfare states both financially and for welfare state redistribution. Baumol’s cost disease, Wagner’s law, and population ageing are often said to bring challenges for the future provision…

We analyze the effect of ICT and R&D on total factor productivity (TFP) growth across different industries in Sweden. R&D alone is significantly associated with contemporaneous TFP growth, thus exhibiting indirect effects. Although there is no…

The purpose of this study is to measure the sensitivity of trade volumes and unit values to agricultural productivity shocks at home and abroad. We ﬁnd that the unit values of trade ﬂows vary systematically with production shocks using both aggregate data…

This study estimates the impact of financial deregulation on top income shares. Using the novel econometric method of constructing synthetic control groups, we show that the "Big Bang"-deregulations in the United Kingdom in 1986 and Japan…

We construct a multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of employment protection. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between units of the same firm that operate in two countries that have different seniority…

The VC sector is interesting both in its own right and as a proxy for entrepreneurial finance in a broader sense. We highlight the tax treatment of stock options as an important factor for variations in the size of the VC sector. VC often relies on…

Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. These evasions rarely go unnoticed and usually lead to responses from lawmakers and regulators. We introduce a conceptual model to illustrate the…

Martin Ljunge, IFN, is the author of a chapter, "Trust promotes health: addressing reverse causality by studying children of immigrants", in a new book edited by Sherman Folland and Eric Nauenberg. The cutting edge of research is presented, covering the ever-expanding social capital field.